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On Greek Stage, Another Papandreou

A statue of Harry Truman that was sawed off at the ankles here during the American intervention in Kosovo still has not been restored -- and may not be. ''We don't know what he looked like,'' Americans pressing for repairs were told.

Such anti-American feeling remains palpable here, nearly 30 years after the demise of an American-supported military dictatorship. But there is one sign that this may be finally changing: The most popular politician in the country today is American born, Amherst-educated and surrounded by a coterie of Greek-American advisers, some of whom speak English only. In his off-hours, he's a gym rat in a culture that does not embrace sweat; he caused a stir in a downtown health club recently just by showing up.

Of course that politician, Foreign Minister George A. Papandreou, is also the son of a prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, and the grandson of another, also George Papandreou. And the foreign minister is someone who could hardly be associated with the American policies that Greeks have not forgotten caused such suffering.

When he was 15, soldiers overthrowing the government broke into his home, held a gun to his throat and demanded to know where his father was hiding. For years, his family was in exile.

These days, American diplomats see Mr. Papandreou, whose mother is American, as a miracle antidote to the anti-American passions that his father, Andreas, made a career of inflaming. He has been one of the few politicians to speak out forcefully against anti-Western terrorism.

But the real proof of his success is that few Greeks seem to hold his gushing American admirers against him. On the contrary, Mr. Papandreou, 49, seems to have the unlikely problem of having become too popular at what he considers the wrong time, and he is actively campaigning to avoid becoming prime minister.

An aide to the foreign minister made this clear when he responded to a request for an interview with the foreign minister by demanding novel assurances -- in essence, that the story would not be too positive.

''If this were to put him forward as a future prime minister,'' the aide said, point blank, ''we would not be interested in doing it.''

A smooch in print from a big American newspaper is still something of a mixed blessing here. But more generally, Mr. Papandreou is doing all he can to avoid being drafted for the top job. When asked about beating a strategic retreat, Mr. Papandreou acknowledged it. ''It's obviously an honor to have a lot of support,'' he said, ''but it's not an opportune moment.''

Greek voters are grouchy just now -- over crime, immigration and a recent stock market crash. They are certainly down on Mr. Papandreou's party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, known as PASOK -- which has chalked up a series of failures since winning last year's elections by a tiny margin.

Party hard-liners in the mold of Andreas Papandreou, a party founder, who died in 1996, have delayed pension reform in a country where it is possible to make more money in retirement than at work, and the government has found no takers for the struggling Olympic Airways.

But in his two and a half years as foreign minister, Mr. Papandreou has engineered a series of foreign policy triumphs like improving relations with Turkey and providing early support to Serbian democrats, actions that were all the more striking because they moved Greek public opinion rather than reacting to it. He has made Greece a much more active partner in the European Union.

And he is seen as the future of his party. Dimitris Keridis, director of the Kokkalis Foundation, which focuses on regional cooperation, said Mr. Papandreou ''can unite the two wings of the party like no one else,'' and ''can combine the tradition of his family name with reform.''

The current party leader and prime minister, Costas Simitis, has called a party congress for October, where delegates will vote whether to keep him as party leader and in effect, as prime minister. And though Mr. Simitis is expected to hang onto his job for now, that is hardly the end of the matter.

''The old left has finally realized that if they bring Simitis down, Papandreou will kick them out in a minute,'' said Dimitri Mitropoulos, a political columnist for Ta Nea. ''So now they're trying to keep Simitis in, but weakened.''

He added that Mr. Papandreou is ''trying to avoid being catapulted into power, because he would go in with a weak mandate.'' But the rank-and-file may demand it, he said, feeling he is necessary to winning the next elections, in two or three years.

American politicians tend to think there is no bad time to take office. And the concept of passing up even a decent shot at the top job may seem particularly exotic after the presidential election in November when the feeling in both camps was pretty much ''mandate, schmandate.'' But no one here seems to think Mr. Papandreou is just playing coy.

''I've said no'' to those pressing him to challenge Mr. Simitis, he said. ''I think I'm doing important things now, then later we'll see.''

Meanwhile, at the Foreign Ministry, as one Western diplomat put it, ''they are wigging out, trying to figure out how to calibrate'' the rather sudden rise of a soft-spoken man who spent years in junior ministerial posts.

He was written off by nearly everyone but his ambitious mother as a lightweight who spent an odd amount of time in the gym. Mr. Papandreou himself, however, is neither wigging out nor expected to in this lifetime.

In a long interview in his office, Mr. Papandreou was so mild, just back from a holiday in Crete, that it was easy to see both how political opponents could misjudge him and how effective he could be at defusing even ancient passions.

He was born in Minnesota, grew up in California and was back in Greece in high school when the junta took over and he had to leave again. And having lived so many years in between cultures helped his understanding of the world, he said.

As education minister under his father in the mid-90's, he was the first Greek politician of any prominence to promote gay rights and drug treatment, and he tried to decriminalize marijuana. These days, he is leading efforts to improve ethnic tolerance inside Greece, where there are large numbers of Albanians and other new immigrants.

He also gets credit at home for making Greece more of a regional player. ''There is a mature, flexible foreign policy in a country that used to be polarized,'' said Mr. Keridis. ''Now you're talking about interests, and that's a shift he engineered, refusing to play the card of Greek nationalism'' as his father did, for example.

Many Greeks tend to see his centrist politics, ''Californian'' demeanor and serene personal life -- one wife, two children -- as a reaction to his thundering father, who humiliated George's mother by divorcing her to marry a young flight attendant.

Like him, ''I was a hard-liner myself, when we were just coming out of a dictatorship the U.S. had supported. There was a strong basis for anti-American felling,'' he said,

Mr. Papandreou said he lived through a period of being ''very unhappy with the dictatorship here, and very unhappy that the U.S. was supporting it. Now I'm in the lucky position to say I have a chance to mend the past.''